We tend to think of colors as fixed properties, and anyone who has studied French, Spanish, German, or Modern Hebrew knows that the basic crayon-box colors have exact equivalents in these languages. But this is not true of all languages. Russian, for instance, has no precise equivalent for “blue,” and other tongues have only two or three words for colors altogether. There was once a Yiddish humor magazine called Royte Pomerantsen—“Red Oranges”—because Yiddish had a word for the fruit but not for the hue. Biblical Hebrew has words meaning white (lavan), black (shahor), and red (adom), as well as names for specific dyes like the turquoise t’khelet. Other color words are a bit of mystery, which leads to problems in interpreting this week’s Torah reading, with its detailed discussions of a dermatological ailment usually rendered as “leprosy.” Phil Lieberman explains:
The basic rules for identifying ritually impure skin disease (tsara’at) are based on color changes: the afflicted individual is impure if the color of the affected skin turns “white” or “reddish white” and if the affected hair turns white. One sub-case, however, mentions the color tsahov. This is a rare Hebrew word, found only three times, all in this section (Leviticus 13:30–36). . . . In Modern Hebrew, it means “yellow,” but is this what it means in the Bible?
Lieberman takes us on a tour of the various translations offered throughout the ages (themselves often ambiguous), which range from yellow to red to simply pale or shiny.
Read more on theTorah.com: https://www.thetorah.com/article/is-yellow-a-biblical-color